How Progressive Reform Created the Conditions for Special Interest Capture in one American City
New Yorkers have made a lot of news of late for putting a socialist — Zohran Mamdani — in charge of the city known as the capital of capitalism. One hundred years ago, socialism was less controversial, and just as resisted.
The Threat They Didn’t Name
By 1912, the Socialist Party of America had become a genuine political force. Eugene Debs polled 901,551 votes for president that year — approximately 6% of roughly 15 million total votes cast, nearly double his 1908 total, and still the high-water mark for American socialism at the presidential level. Wilson, Roosevelt, and Taft together dominated that election, yet the trajectory was unmistakable: the radical labor movement had genuine electoral momentum.¹⁷ Between roughly 1910 and 1918, Socialist Party candidates won approximately 1,200 elected offices across the country — including 79 mayoralties, 32 state legislative seats, and 1 seat in the United States Congress.¹⁸ In Milwaukee, Emil Seidel was elected mayor in 1910 on a platform of municipal ownership of utilities and genuine democratic accountability to the working class. In Schenectady, just 80 miles from Newburgh, the Socialist Party elected George Lunn mayor in 1911. In New York City, Socialist candidate Morris Hillquit came within striking distance of the mayoralty in 1917, the same year Newburgh’s charter was formally enacted into state law.
The Socialists were not merely campaigning for better administration. They were arguing for a fundamentally different answer to the question of whose interests city government should serve. Municipal ownership of utilities, eight-hour workdays enforced through local ordinance, free textbooks, democratic accountability to the working class — these were not efficiency proposals. They were class demands. And they were winning elections.
What made the socialist municipal wave genuinely threatening was not the rhetoric. It was the record. Where Socialists won, they governed — and they governed in ways that directly challenged the economic arrangements the business class depended on. Seidel’s Milwaukee administration established the first municipal public works department in the country, created the city’s park system, raised the minimum wage for city laborers, made the eight-hour day standard for municipal crews, and began enforcing building and health inspections in working-class neighborhoods that had been ignored for decades.¹⁹ Lunn’s Schenectady hired the city’s first public health nurses, initiated free garbage collection, and proposed city-run distribution of coal, ice, and groceries to break the private monopolies that gouged working families — proposals ambitious enough to attract a young Walter Lippmann from Harvard as Lunn’s personal secretary.²⁰ These were not theoretical programs. They were operating governments, delivering services, and redirecting municipal resources from the business class to the working class through ordinary democratic means.
The council-manager movement arose in direct competition with this socialist municipal wave. The at-large election system that is structurally central to the council-manager form was, as Hays documented, explicitly designed to dilute the concentrated voting power of working-class neighborhoods from which socialist candidates were drawing their majorities.²¹ The nonpartisan ballot eliminated the party label from local elections — and with it, the primary tool through which working-class and immigrant voters identified their candidates. On a partisan ballot, a voter who couldn’t read English fluently could find the Socialist or Democratic column and vote the ticket. On a nonpartisan ballot, every candidate appeared as an individual name with no affiliation shown. Navigating it required either literacy, inside knowledge, or the kind of organized voter guidance that only well-resourced campaigns could provide. The reform was presented as reducing corruption. Its practical effect was to disadvantage exactly the voters the machines had been mobilizing. The appointed manager replaced the elected executive who could be held accountable by a working-class majority.
Each of these features was defended on efficiency grounds. Each was, in structural effect, a mechanism for preventing what the Socialists were already demonstrating: that working-class majorities could elect governments accountable to them.
The Espionage Act of 1917 — the year that Newburgh passed its charter — and the Red Scare of 1919–1920 destroyed the Socialist Party as a national political force. Debs himself was convicted for an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, and ran his 1920 presidential campaign from a cell in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, where he received nearly a million votes as Convict No. 9653.²² By the early 1920s, the political pressure from the left that had been forcing the Progressive mainstream to at least acknowledge working-class interests had largely collapsed. What remained was the efficiency apparatus — council, manager, at-large elections — without the democratic accountability the Socialists had demanded. A decade later, Franklin Roosevelt would coopt the most popular socialist demands — the eight-hour day, minimum wage, social security, the right to organize — and deliver them through the federal administrative state, saving capitalism from its own crisis while draining the electoral energy from the left.²³ The working class got the policy. They lost the power. The socialist mayors had been delivering these same programs at the municipal level through democratic working-class majorities. The council-manager form was designed to make sure that couldn’t happen again.
The reformers had won not only against the machines but against the only political movement that had been pushing them toward a more genuine democracy.
The Republican Heirs
Here is the contradiction that standard political history papers over: the Progressive movement was, in its municipal governance strand, substantially a Republican project. This requires explanation, because “Progressive Era” has been absorbed into Democratic Party mythology as a period of liberal reform against conservative resistance. That narrative is misleading in several directions. The Democratic Party in the 1890s and 1900s was the party of the Solid South and Tammany Hall — the party of the machines the reformers were fighting. The Republican Party in the North was the party of the business and professional class that built the Progressive reform movement. Theodore Roosevelt, the era’s iconic progressive president, was a Republican. The National Municipal League’s founding coalition was predominantly Republican. B.B. Odell, who had consolidated Republican dominance of Newburgh and the Hudson Valley while engineering Roosevelt’s political career, was part of the same broad Republican establishment that the National Municipal League served.
This matters for the argument that follows because the partisan identity of the reformers has been lost — absorbed into a vague narrative of “progressive reform” that obscures who was reforming what, and for whose benefit. The men who designed the council-manager form were not nonpartisan idealists rising above the fray. They were Republicans, representing the business and property-owning class, designing a governance structure that would permanently disadvantage the Democratic-voting, working-class, immigrant communities organized through the ward machines. That the word “Republican” has since changed its meaning, and that the council-manager form is now operated in Newburgh by Democrats, is precisely the point: the structure was never about party. It was about class. The party labels rotated. The class function persisted.
Charles Beard understood this contradiction — lived inside it, in fact. Beard was the most influential Progressive Era political scientist in the country. His Bureau of Municipal Research was institutionally allied with the same reform movement whose class character his own analytical method could expose. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, published in 1913 — two years before Newburgh’s charter referendum — applied to the founding document precisely the class analysis that, applied to the Progressive Era charter reform movement, would have revealed it as a project of the propertied class dressed in democratic rhetoric. The book caused a scandal. It was denounced as unpatriotic, Marxist, an insult to the founders.²⁴ What it actually was, was a method: follow the economic interests of the men who designed the institution, and you will understand what the institution does.
Beard used Marxist analytical tools — the idea that economic interests drive political decisions — while rejecting Marxist political conclusions. He was a social democrat who believed capitalism could be reformed through professional administration rather than overcome through democratic working-class power.²⁴ As a young man at Oxford he had co-founded Ruskin Hall, a school designed to make university education accessible to working men.²⁵ He later taught history at Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York — less than an hour from Newburgh — the first residential labor college in the country, known as “labor’s Harvard,” where working-class students trained to become union organizers and movement leaders.²⁶ He was not indifferent to the working class. He believed in their education, their development, their participation. He simply could not follow his own method to its conclusion: that the professional-administrative structures he supported were themselves instruments of class power, and that no amount of better administration would overcome what they were designed to do.
This is not hypocrisy. It is the structural position of the intellectual who understands power clearly and still believes the right people, armed with the right analysis, can administer their way to better outcomes. Beard was simultaneously the most penetrating diagnostician of how class interest shapes governance and a genuine believer in professional administration as its antidote. His method implied the abolition of structures that serve class interest. His politics stopped at their reform.
What Beard’s method implies, followed to its conclusion: the council-manager form, designed by business reformers to break the political power of working-class communities in the 1910s, will continue to serve organized interests regardless of the intentions of individual administrators, because the structure determines outcomes independent of individual virtue. You cannot administer your way out of an arrangement designed for different purposes.
Beard didn’t make that argument. One hundred and ten years later, it can be made. And there is a building in Newburgh that proves it.
¹⁷ Eugene V. Debs received 901,551 votes (approximately 6%) in the 1912 presidential election, running on the Socialist Party ticket against Woodrow Wilson (Democrat), Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive), and William Howard Taft (Republican). This was nearly double his 420,793 votes in 1908. See Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982).
¹⁸ Between 1910 and 1918, Socialist Party candidates won approximately 1,200 elected offices nationwide, including 79 mayoralties in 24 states. See James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (1967); David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (1955).
¹⁹ Emil Seidel established the first municipal public works department in an American city, organized the first fire and police commissions, created Milwaukee’s park system, raised the minimum wage for city laborers from $1.75 to $2.50 per day, and made the eight-hour day standard for municipal crews. See “Emil Seidel,” Encyclopedia of Milwaukee (emke.uwm.edu); “When Socialists Cleaned Up Milwaukee,” The Progressive Populist; “Emil Seidel — The First Sewer Socialist Mayor,” Socialist Currents. The Democrats and Republicans ran a joint fusion candidate to unseat him in 1912.
²⁰ George R. Lunn was elected mayor of Schenectady in 1911 as a Socialist. He initiated free garbage collection, established a public health clinic, and worked with General Electric scientist Charles Steinmetz to create Central Park and improve the city’s schools. He proposed city-run distribution of coal, ice, and groceries to undercut private monopolies, though some of these programs faltered during his first term. His personal secretary was a young Walter Lippmann, fresh from Harvard, who quit after four months complaining Lunn was not radical enough. See Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr., “George R. Lunn and the Socialist Era in Schenectady, New York, 1909–1916,” New York History 47, no. 1 (January 1966): 22–40; Andrew Morris, “The Socialist Mayor Who Came 100 Years Before Zohran Mamdani,” TIME, July 22, 2025; Bill Buell, George Lunn: The 1912 Socialist Victory in Schenectady (2012).
²¹ Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55, no. 4 (October 1964): 157–169. Hays documented how at-large election systems were explicitly designed to replace ward-based representation, diluting the concentrated voting power of working-class and immigrant neighborhoods that had sustained both machine politics and socialist electoral victories.
²² Debs was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 for an antiwar speech delivered at Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction in Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919). He was sentenced to ten years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. In 1920, he ran for president from prison as Convict No. 9653 and received 913,664 votes (3.4%). President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence on Christmas Day, 1921. See Glenn V. Longacre, “Eugene Debs at Canton, Ohio,” Prologue 49, no. 4 (Winter 2017–18), National Archives; Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (2008).
²³ The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established the federal eight-hour day and minimum wage. The Social Security Act of 1935 created the federal retirement and unemployment insurance system. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) guaranteed the right to organize and bargain collectively. Each of these had been core demands of the Socialist Party platform since 1912. FDR was candid about his intent: preserving the capitalist system by addressing its most destabilizing failures through federal administration. See Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013).
²⁴ Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). The book argued that the framers’ economic interests — holdings in public securities, land, manufacturing — shaped the Constitution’s structure and protections. It was denounced as unpatriotic and Marxist upon publication. Beard resigned from Columbia University in 1917 partly over the controversy. See Ellen Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (1983). Beard’s broader intellectual project combined Marxist analytical methods — the primacy of economic interests in shaping political outcomes — with a social democratic faith in professional administration as the remedy, a tension that runs through all his work on municipal reform.
²⁵ Beard co-founded Ruskin Hall at Oxford in 1899 with Walter Vrooman. The school was designed to make Oxford education accessible to working-class men; students worked in the school’s businesses in exchange for reduced tuition. Beard taught there and lectured to workers in industrial towns to promote enrollment. See “Charles A. Beard,” Wikipedia; “Charles Beard,” Histories of the New School (histories.newschool.edu).
²⁶ Brookwood Labor College (1921–1937) was located at 109 Cedar Road in Katonah, New York, approximately 50 miles from Newburgh. It was the first residential labor college in the United States and was known as “labor’s Harvard.” Beard taught history there. The faculty list includes “Charles A. Beard (history).” See “Brookwood Labor College,” Wikipedia; Yonkers Public Library, “Brookwood Labor College: Early 20th-Century Workers’ Education in Westchester” (ypl.org).
